“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” (Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10th 1948).

FrenchLeaks is a site dedicated to the transmission of documents of public interest and which notably, but not exclusively, concern issues of public interest in Europe. Under the editorial management of the online news journal Mediapart, it exists to serve the right of access to information and the process of democratic debate and is totally independent of any political or economic interests.

FrenchLeaks is both a documentary tool and an instrument for alert. It provides the public with free access to documents that have been properly verified through investigations by Mediapart journalists. It allows sources to transmit to us, in all security and confidentiality, documents of public interest which will be published online after a prior investigation carried out within full respect of the rules that apply to the journalistic profession.

From mid-July 2011, Mediapart began the publication of a lengthy series of investigations into the activities of Paris-based Franco-Lebanese arms dealer and business intermediary Ziad Takieddine. He is the principal suspect in an ongoing judicial investigation into suspected illegal political funding via French weapons sales abroad, known as the ‘Karachi affair’. Mediapart’s investigations revealed Takieddine’s intimate dealings with the close entourage of then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and notably his role as a secret diplomatic intermediary…

Several members of the French Football Federation’s National Technical Board, including the then- France national team coach Laurent Blanc, in 2010 secretly approved a quota selection process to reduce the number of young black players, and those of North African origin, entering the country’s youth training centres and which groom potential candidates for the national team. A recording of the meeting when the plan was discussed was revealed in an investigation by Mediapart.

After four months of adamant denials in public and before parliament that he possessed a secret bank account abroad, former budget minister Jérôme Cahuzac, who was forced to stand down from his government post during the developing scandal, finally admitted to holding the account on April 2nd 2013. Mediapart’s investigations, which first revealed the existence of the tax-evading account, found that Cahuzac had secretly begun transferring his wealth abroad as of the early 1990s. But there was more to the story than that. These are the documents that supported Mediapart’s revelations...

Did Nicolas Sarkozy receive funding for his successful 2007 presidential election campaign from the regime of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi? The documents published here suggest that he did. As do, also, several accounts given by former Libyan officials who were close to the late dictator.